I'm listening to "Black Night" right now and it occurs to me that that song may have the greatest nonsense lyrics of all time.

Ever listen to a song you're very familiar with, and find that for some reason it just hits your ear in a different way?

I had that experience last night while listening to DP's self-titled third LP in my car. "The Painter" came on, which I've heard dozens of times before, and for some reason I found that Richie's guitar work on that track really impressed me in a way I hadn't noticed before. Maybe I'd been more focused on Rod's vocals or Jon's organ in previous listens, I don't know. Anyway, my appreciation for this song is at a new level. That's one of the joys of music for me. You can listen to a song for years and still find things you like about it you'd never really thought about much before.

I am a technophobe, I think. I'm generally resistant to new technology (although I was a quick adopter of DVD and CD) for whatever reason. I have avoided iTunes and iPods like the plague. In this case, a lot of my problem has to do with lossy music formats. However, I often find that once I actually try new technology, I like it.

I recently started playing around with iTunes for the first time, so I could stay caught up on 24. After I actually played with it a little bit, it occured to me that music in a lossy format wouldn't make much difference to listen to at work since I can't crank it up and probably wouldn't notice much difference on computer speakers anyway.

So, last week I decided to import all of Deep Purple's studio albums into my computer's iTunes. I now have just over 18 hours of Deep Purple on my computer taking up just under 1 gig of my hard drive. And I am loving it.

Normally I like to listen to albums straight through but today I put my DP play list on shuffle, and it's an interesting listening experience - like having my own private DP radio station. With the various lineups and styles the band has had over the years, you can get interesting combinations. For example, here are the last five songs that have played on my computer: "Girls Like That", "Rat Bat Blue ('99 Remix)", "Truth Hurts", "Bad Attitude", and "You Keep On Moving." Up next: "Somebody Stole My Guitar." This is a lot of fun and it's re-energized my DP listening experience. In fact, I'm thinking about importing my Rainbow albums soon.

I'm still not buying an iPod though!